Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
The Suicide Squad seeks to answer that age old question of “How much goodwill is generated for an audience by brutally killing off Jai Courtney and Pete Davidson in the first few minutes?”, that answer seemingly being “a good bit, actually”.
Quite why there is a sequel to David Ayer’s, kinda, 2016 Suicide Squad will baffle future historians of the era, given that the 2016 outing was just the worst, but apparently enough dump trucks of cash were dispatched to James Gunn, he of Guardians of the Galaxy fame, to take on the challenge of making a better film than the original. Well, okay, that’s not much of a challenge, I suppose it’s more to make a film good enough to overcome the massive inertia of Ayer’s rock, a tall order indeed.
To that end, meet the new team, not quite the same as the old team, albeit with a few returning faces. Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller recruits / blackmails Idris Elba’s gruff assassin Bloodsport to lead a team into the civil wartorn island of Val Verde, probably, to destroy a problematic research facility. His team comprises John Cena’s Peacemaker, who loves peace so much he’ll kill everyone to get it, David Dastmalchian’s Polka-Dot Man, a depressed, tortured soul with so much love, and hyperkinetic exploding polkadots to give, Daniela Melchior’s Ratcatcher 2, who controls rats, naturally, and Sylvester Stallone’s King Shark, who is a shark. A landshark, of course. So, yes, your normal service of weird goons has resumed, the team soon joined by Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Joel Kinnaman’s Colonel Rick Flag after their separate distractionary mission goes south early on.
Turns out the facility they’re out to ruin, headed up by Peter Capaldi’s Gaius “The Thinker” Grieves, is holding captive a giant intergalactic mind controlling starfish, Starro the Conqueror, and unleashing him causes another bunch of problems for the Squad to clean up, and some amount of inter-team conflict once America’s role in Grieves’ horrific experimentations are uncovered.
Now all of that sounds like a fever dream when written out, and that’s not far off the aesthetic that Gunn seems to have been shooting for, so I won’t spend much more time on recapping the events of the film, for they are silly. Now, this is of course a marked step up from Ayer’s film, whose main motif appeared to be stultifying boredom. No, this film is silly, and features mostly silly action scenes handled in as light hearted a fashion as is possible, given the bodycount, which is also silly, and the violence, which would be gruesome were it not so silly.
I’m not sure there’s a lot of point me giving you much more of the chapter and verse on this film – it is very much like its trailer, but two hours and a bit of it, so if you like that sort of thing this is the sort of thing you’ll like. If you must have my opinions, they’re broadly positive. It is, for the most part, a good amount of fun, perhaps flagging a bit in the final act, but even then the outright daftness of the finale almost counterbalances it. It’s fun watching Elba and Cena butt heads, Robbie is dependably entertaining, and the supporting characters get their moments in the sun without cluttering up the place too much and the prevailing tone is much better matched to the dumb content of the piece. I like Gunn’s colourful and dynamic ways of transitioning between scenes, and the variety of somewhat abstract styles in which he shoots his shooting.
It’s not high art, but it’s a fun way to pass a few hours. Good enough to wipe out the memories of the first film? Apparently not as far as the audience is concerned, if the early box office is to be believed, but it deserves the positive write-ups it has been getting, even if I’ve already started to forget everything that happened in it.
Better than the first one out of five.